Researchers “grow” pharmaceuticals

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. – In research that could turn Garden State farmers into highly profitable manufacturers of pharmaceuticals and other therapeutic agents, Rutgers University scientists have developed a way to use living plants to reliably and inexpensively manufacture biologically active compounds ranging from human insulin to cancer-fighting supplements.

A research group led by Rutgers professor of Biology Ilya Raskin plans to partner with New Jersey farmers through Phytomedics Inc., a Middlesex County company he founded in 1996, to grow plants for their therapeutic benefits rather than their food value.

Dayton-based Phytomedics is currently training selected New Jersey farmers to use the new technology.

Raskin expects his patented technology to economically revive New Jersey farmers since they will be able to move from producing low-value food commodities to high-value therapeutic agents.

“Traditional agriculture is aimed at increasing plant yields, something that’s important in third world nations, but no longer as important here,” he notes.

Others under study show promise as tools to combat baldness, high cholesterol levels, and Parkinson’s disease, said Raskin.

The most advanced pipeline prescription product is a botanical drug that in clinical trials has proven highly effective against rheumatoid arthritis.

But the first product expected is a non-prescription anti-cancer food supplement made from a compound produced by winter cress, a leafy plant sometimes used in salads.

As a non-prescription product, it won’t be required to undergo the time-consuming federal approval process for prescription drugs, notes Raskin.

Equally promising is Phytomedics plant manufacturing technology aimed at the market for so-called recombinant proteins, which are produced by combining genes from different species.

The technology, in which recombinant genes are inserted in plant chromosomes to manufacture pharmacologically active proteins, is currently being used to induce tobacco plants to make insulin and other disease-fighting proteins.

A reconnection.

The new technology reconnects ethical drugs with plants, their original source before synthetic drugs came to dominate the marketplace, notes Raskin.

Although pharmaceutical companies have found many plant sources for drugs, the primitive bioprospecting methods used to collect them haven’t changed for centuries – essentially gathering them from plants in the wild or from cultivated fields and then grinding them up to extract their curative powers, Raskin said.

However, with the new technology, the researchers have been able to turn plants into “pharmaceutical factories” that continuously supply therapeutic compounds by growing them in tightly controlled and regulated hydroponic (grown in water) greenhouses.

The highly controlled greenhouse environment also eliminates a major problem for drug manufacturers – the inconsistent quality of compounds from plants grown under a wide variety of environmental conditions.

While stressing technology offers promise, the greatest medical revolution may result from using plants to manufacture proteins – the first time proteins have been produced via plant secretion, said Raskin.

Plants constantly take in chemicals or nutrients and secrete or release other chemicals or wastes into the environment. The scientist has “piggy-banked” on the secretion part of this continuous exchange to cause plants to produce proteins.

Inexpensive proteins.

Raskin believes it will lead to inexpensive production of recombinant human proteins to combat diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and other life-threatening ailments.

He notes that a number of researchers are making proteins from plants, but the technology is expensive because it requires growing the plant, harvesting it, and grinding it up to extract the protein.

“With our method, getting proteins from a plant is just like milking a cow,” said Raskin. “You don’t have to kill the cow, grind it up, and then extract the milk to get it – you get it by ‘milking’ the plant. And you get it continuously, over and over again.”

Speeding up the process.

To speed up the process of bioprospecting for promising compounds in plants from all over the world, the Rutgers/Phytomedics team has developed patented technology that uses the numbers-crunching power of computers employing so-called bioinformatics and data-mining techniques.

The technology allows the research team to rapidly compare the molecular structures of newly discovered plant compounds to known compounds in order to uncover those with therapeutic potential.

This approach has reduced the time needed for identifying promising compounds from years to a few days, Raskin said.

As a result, the “hit” rate has become at least a hundred times greater than that of conventional bioprospecting, the scientist reports.

The new technology also permits his team to access close to 80 percent of the chemical diversity overlooked by conventional methods.

“But we still have a long way to go,” asserts Raskin, “since only a tiny percentage of the estimated 250,000 plant species in the world have been assayed.”